Sam Leith

So according to a front-page report in the Guardian, Ian McEwan is writing a novel. It is about a scientist – McEwan's two cultures jones continues, it seems – who wants to rid the world of climate change, and McEwan read from it at a very wet and soggy Hay festival, no doubt pleasing the crowd.Â

Ian McEwan insists that his book is not a comic novel

The initial version of the story reported that it "tells the story of physician who finds that winning a Nobel Prize interferes with his work". This has since been amended, and the online version now finds him not a doctor but a physicist, which will no doubt improve his chances of saving theÂ world. The book sounds fun, I must sayÂ - not least because it recycles the ancient Douglas Adams story about eating biscuits on a train, only this time with crisps.

My guess is with blogs you can either come screaming out of the traps, or you can be a bit late.

Samuel Johnson himself

So this is a bit late. But in case anyone missed the news, they last week announced the shortlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Sam Johnson, who liked his lie-ins, wouldn't I hope have minded.

Odd to think this is the prize's 10th year: odd because an omnium gatherum sort of non-fiction gong was surely long overdue by the time it started; and odd because it feels much longer-established. It's now part of the furnitureÂ - and even if what it actually does is sometimes vague and hard to pin down, it has a stupendously good hit-rate.

Sometimes it pits like with oddly like. I remember theÂ year my friend Alexander Masters was shortlisted for his first book Stuart: A Life Backwards. At the end, the… Read More

Thinking aboutÂ absent friendsÂ this week, I found myselfÂ drawn to re-read one of the all time great absent friend poems: Allen Ginsberg's Howl forÂ Carl Solomon. That's the famous poem from the Sixties (except it was published in 1956).

Allen Ginsberg: poet of the Beat generation

You know, the one that begins "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…", and that provoked an obscenity trial, and the first reading of which at City Lights in San Francisco, according to legend, brought tears, the house down, and got the Beats properly underway. You can find it online but since it's in copyright I'd better notÂ post a link. The best thing to do if you really like it is augment your red paperback collected Allen G with the facsimile manuscript here.

Poems that feel so much part of the furniture can be hard toÂ see clearly as poemsÂ - so barnacled… Read More

I had that Kingsley Amis in the back of me cab once. Very clever man. Reading Neil Powell's new biography of Kingsley and Martin AmisÂ - I'm reviewing it for this week's SpectatorÂ - I came across a great piece of Amis/Larkin banter, long forgotten and deserving of revival. As undergraduates, Kingsley and Philip went through the great classics of the Western Canon and pronounced a number of them "ape's bumfodder".

I may lend him my volume of John, by Niall Williams

Vulgar abuse, too, surelyÂ has its place in the critical lexicon. And this ingeniously childish and nonsensical (why would an ape's bum need fodder? reminds me of the old joke about Noel Coward telling his doctor he had a pain in his rear end "near the entrance"; doctor: "in my profession we call that the exit") verbal graffito is just the ticket.

An instance of something looking suspiciously like ape's bumfodder… Read More

Few things in recent memory have been quite so popular as LouiseÂ Doughty's weekly column encouraging readers to write A Novel In A Year. As veterans of the website will remember, this writing course became a mini-cult, and the online message-boards were sometimes support group, sometimes debating societyÂ and sometimes warzone.

Louise Doughty has helped aspiring writers get published

The columns became the basis for Louise's excellent book, whose particulars can be found here, for her table-turning Writer's Year column, and now for her fortnightly blog. Consult them, ye aspiring novelists.Â I know I will, when I finally get started on my roman fleuve a clef, Reflections On An Ordinary Navel.

They also kicked off our writing competitionÂ - where we invited you to submit the first 1,000 words, plus synopsis, of your novel. Tempted no doubt by the Oscar-night glamour of the prize (lunch with… Read More

When is a book not a book? Or when is a not-book a book? These are the interesting questions implicitly posed by an email I received recently from Julian Dibbell.

DoÂ virtual objects really have any value?

Mr Dibbell, aÂ new media journalist of particular imagination and ingenuity, was one of the first people to write seriously for a wide audience about the economies of virtual worlds, and the philosophical, moral and legal conundrums they give rise to.

If this mashes your swede, let me boil it down. Millions of people spend time playing massively multiplayer online games like Second Life and (my own and Mr Dibbell's current poison) World of Warcraft, where they all move around in the same virtual world, doing stuff and interacting with each-other.

In these games they "earn" virtual objects and in-game currency. These objects and currencies have value to the players, and because you can… Read More

What a pleasing number of comments readers have already left on our list of top Cult Books. The thing that strikes me most strongly is that it does seem to bear out my theory that though you can't define a cult book, you sure know one when you see one.

The work of a 'heroically bonkers sociological theorist'

A lot of the ones people have mentioned Bukowski (remember his "purple onion"? eww!), Flann O'Brien, Ray Bradbury, DeLillo, Margaret Atwood (Handmaid, or Edible Woman, though?) and JP Donleavy among them were there on our longlist. Colin Midson probably won't ever forgive me for not including Magnus Mills. And, as Andrew McKie points out, you could potentially include practically every sf book ever written.

As a side-project, I reckon we could all nominate what you might call "one-man cult" books. There are definitely a few books that, though they wouldn't… Read More

The sainted Deborah Moggach blew in at lunchtime today, and immediately started swapping stories of author-publicity humiliations with her fellow writers. Her own low point, she recalled, was when she was signing a copy of her book in a local bookshop.

Andrew O'Hagan and India Knight

Everyone who bought a book, she said, was to be given a free glass of wine and a gift box of posh toiletries – "so, really, it was a very good deal – they were effectively paying you to take a book away". There she sat all afternoon, without selling a single book. Finally, a young man with Down's syndrome approached her. "Do you sell tights?" he asked. He left disappointed.

She consoles herself by comparing this favourably with the poet Simon Armitage. After a night sleeping on an unwashed Z-bed in an obsessive fan's front room (his accommodation after the… Read More

The poet Alice Oswald, as Seamus Heaney remarked while he was here, more or less "owns" this part of the world. We're on the river Dart, which gave both its name and its spirit to her second book of poetry. A wonderful writer about the natural world (her favourite definition of "nature", she says, is Heidegger's: "that which is pervaded by externality"), she's now on her third book, Woods Etc.

Woods etc in Dartington

She's the real deal. She loves the broken-in-the-middle old Anglo-Saxon line, and mistrusts iambic pentameters; she looks to Wyatt, John Clare, Ted Hughes and Homer. She reads her own work with force and exactness. She's currently working on a piecemeal autobiography of the moon. She makes her own bread. And, she adds with pride from the lectern, she's ace at skimming stones: "I can do about 20."

Return to deckchair. Leave deckchair when next able. Eat supper. And so to bed. Repeat as necessary.

Monday was a day of big names and big biographies of important historical figures.

There was John Campbell on Lloyd George's mistress; Antonia Fraser on Louis XIV's many mistresses; Charles Spencer on Prince Rupert; Simon Sebag Montefiore (who I hope will be producing his desert island books for the paper in due course: you promised, Sebag, and I haven't… Read More